Nancy Hocking-McDonough wants to give her mother the voice she never found in life. Although Phyllis Oxley Hocking enjoyed singing in the church choir, the song in her heart was a tortured one. And until the day she died 16 years ago, few people had heard the dirge that played throughout her adulthood.
For almost four decades, Hocking-McDonough says, her mother was a victim of domestic violence at the hands of her father, Milt, a former mayor of the Downstate town of Jacksonville. The family had returned there in 1972 after living eight years in Chicago and Barrington, where Hocking-McDonough graduated from high school in 1967.
On the few occasions over the years when Phyllis Hocking did cry for help, she never followed through. She gave no details of her hurt. She kept her anguish hidden. Time and again Phyllis Hocking shrugged off the physical and verbal outbursts of her husband as though they were storms — harrowing at times, but never dangerous enough to warrant fleeing. Phyllis Hocking had survived these episodes so many times, and the anger always subsided, calm settled again. Until the next time. And the time after that.
As a girl, Hocking-McDonough would awaken frequently to the sounds of objects crashing to the floor, harsh words reverberating down the halls, her mother yelling for help.
“Many, many times I would say to mother in the middle of the night, `Let’s just get in the car and go.’ And she would say, `Well, we’re in our pajamas.’
“And I’d say, `It doesn’t matter. Let’s just get in the car and go.
“And that didn’t happen.”
Nor did those from outside their home respond to her pleas.
“I had tried at different times to tell her story to other people while I was growing up, to (get them to) intervene on the situation or to get help,” Hocking-McDonough says. “And people didn’t believe me at times, or they denied that (the abuse) could be happening. They didn’t want to know.”
The nocturnal noises of abuse filled Hocking-McDonough’s childhood. But it was the silence surrounding them that was most resonant.
Now a professor at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass., and many years removed from those awful events, Hocking-McDonough is turning her mother’s muted song into a record–not in the musical sense.
Hers is a visual presentation of people going on record to tell their stories of a woman who was abused so often and so long that she felt forced to make a tragic choice.
Late Friday night, two days before Mother’s Day in 1984, Hocking-McDonough’s mother committed suicide by going to the garage and sitting in the car with the motor running. The carbon monoxide leaked into their attached home and killed her husband too.
“I want her story to be told,” Hocking-McDonough says. “It is important to me and important to me to connect to her in that way because I always knew her story. From early on, about 8 or 9 years old, I was aware of this specific issue.”
The issue, domestic violence, gets more public discourse these days, but that isn’t always the case. In many families, it remains a most guarded secret.
“The secrets are really killers,” Hocking-McDonough says.
To illuminate the darkness in which domestic violence hides, she has set out to produce a trilogy of films that chronicles her family’s history and tragedy. Hocking-McDonough, 51, completed the first film, “Mother’s Day,” six years ago. It opens with these words:
On Mother’s Day, May 13, 1984, my parents were found dead in their home. At the time of their deaths, my father had been the mayor of a small Midwestern city for 11 years. At the time of their deaths, my mother had been a battered woman for their marriage of 37 years.
. . . At the time, many people found ways to commemorate my father, Milt, for his work as a politician and public servant. I choose to commemorate my mother, Phyllis, today, by telling her story.
What “Mother’s Day” lacks in cinematic quality, it more than makes up for in its riveting accounts of Phyllis Hocking’s experiences, as told by her mother, Lucille Oxley (who died in 1994); her brother-in-law, Dee Hocking, and his wife Sharon (who died in 1997); and Hocking-McDonough.
On camera Lucille Oxley pauses frequently to remember details. Sometimes she drops her head or looks off into the distance while talking. She talks to Hocking-McDonough, who listens and asks questions off camera.
“Oh, I did so many things I wish I hadn’t done. I just wish God will forgive me. . . . I didn’t want her to marry Milt.
“I had heard that he drank. He was awfully jealous. He didn’t even want her to sing in the choir, because there were men in the choir. . . . When he drank, he was mean. I saw her many times with a black eye. She went through a lot, but she stayed with him.”
In the next segment, Milt Hocking’s youngest brother and his wife share their observations, speaking of a cookout where Phyllis Hocking arrived with bruises on her face, and the reason she gave for staying with her husband.
Dee: “She said to me that if she left that I would not understand how much it would hurt him . . . She said to me, `You don’t understand. He’s going to find me no matter where I go.'”
In the final segment, Hocking-McDonough recalls a particularly extreme incident after her parents had moved to Chicago from Barrington.
“They were living in the John Hancock Building and mother had to be hospitalized. She explained to me that she and father had had people visiting. Father had been drinking. When the people left, he had beaten her badly that night, burned her with a cigarette. She was unconscious for several days in the hospital.”
At the film’s end, Hocking-McDonough says she wants people “to understand how to intervene. If loving someone enough could make a difference, then I would have made a difference with my mother.”
Her parents’ only child, Hocking-McDonough says she confronted her father “many times over the years,” starting around age 9 until the fall before they died, to get him to stop the abuse.
She also says that, despite her entreaties, she lost all hope of her mother ever leaving her father when her mother canceled an appointment with a crisis-counseling center that Hocking-McDonough had encouraged her to make in 1982.
By most appearances, Phyllis Hocking’s life was “so put-together,” Sharon Hocking says in “Mother’s Day.” With her husband as mayor of Jacksonville, Phyllis Hocking, by all accounts, had been a dutiful wife, his loyal supporter. Two months before he died, Milt Hocking had traveled to Europe with former Gov. Jim Thompson. Phyllis Hocking’s 1984 calendar, from January to May, was filled with engagements–luncheons, bridge club, her work as a bookkeeper for a jeweler.
The calendar was her record of their life, the ordinary and the special events. It also kept track of her husband’s drinking episodes, when he unleashed the storms. On those days, she penciled in a small black triangle in the top left corner of the calendar square.
The calendar square of the day on which they died, however, is empty, although Phyllis Hocking had marked up her calendar for the rest of the month.
A year after her parents’ death, Hocking-McDonough established a living trust in her mother’s name at a crisis center in Jacksonville, the funds to be used for women and children who were victims of domestic violence.
Lynn Taylor Clark now runs the center, called the Crisis Center Foundation. She didn’t know the Hockings but heard about their story from staff members who were living in Jacksonville at the time they died. She has never met Hocking-McDonough. But she understands abuse and has worked for almost 20 years helping women who are its victims.
In rural areas, like the one she serves, there is a high degree of isolation, she says, which makes it difficult for women to get out of bad relationships. She also believes that in small towns there is greater secrecy than you would find in a town the size of Springfield, which is 30 miles away.
Another worker at the center, who said she knew the Hockings, declined to comment about the case because in a small town “everybody knows everybody.”
Phyllis Hocking was 58 when she died. She had been battered for more than half her life.
Asked whether it’s unusual for abuse to go on that long, Clark describes a former client, who, after 45 years in an abusive marriage, at age 71, finally sought help at a shelter, only after her physician confronted her about the bruises and injuries she had.
When the Hockings were in the throes of their problems in the ’80s, shelters were just beginning to crop up, Clark says.
“When I first started,” she says, “it was hard to get anyone to say this is a crime.”
She says most people now acknowledge domestic violence’s horror, but that doesn’t mean that the need for crisis counseling is shrinking. The Crisis Center Foundation needs another space and is breaking ground for a new shelter within a month, she says.
And Hocking-McDonough’s work will go on, for the sake of her mother and other families caught in the cycle of abuse.
A professor in human services at Lesley, where she has worked for eight years, she also has designed programs in the areas of substance abuse, counseling and domestic violence intervention and prevention.
Hocking-McDonough holds a doctorate in women’s studies, with specializations in education and psychology, from Union College in Ohio.
She is working to get her second film, to be called “Chicken Row,” finished by the end of the year. It will tell her father’s story, Chicken Row being the name of the section of town where he grew up in Franklin, Ill., a town of 500 people about 20 miles southwest of Springfield. All the footage will be in black and white to help convey the time period in which her father, who was born in 1927, grew up.
“The point of it is that I don’t believe anybody’s born a monster,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in Merrimac, Mass.
The last film, titled “Snarly Lips,” will be Hocking-McDonough’s own story. She sees it, artistically, as a one-woman show and will include some of the “miles and miles of 8-millimeter reels of when I was growing up,” she says. “Time and place are very important.” She hopes to have it finished in two years.
The films, which she shows at women’s studies and psychology conferences and at crisis centers, are helping her work her way through her family’s tragedy, she says.
“The byproduct of `Mother’s Day,’ `Chicken Row’ and eventually my story is to illustrate what can happen in a family that doesn’t get help and to explain what occurs and what goes on in families or can go on.”
And, ultimately, as she says in one part of “Mother’s Day,” maybe other women’s fates will change as a result of knowing her mother’s suffering:
“I believe that until we can share the most personal accounts of our lives with the world, we are caught in stories of oppression, both personally and within our communities.
“. . . It is my hope that people who hear her story will be challenged and empowered to create new stories of freedom, which they might live.”
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Nancy Hocking-McDonough makes “Mother’s Day” available to groups and organizations working with victims of domestic violence. E-mail inquiries to: nhocking@mail.lesley.edu.
